Review: There's nothing traditional about The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

Film Review: The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2.5 stars)

(2.5 stars)

A ballad is traditionally a slow and sentimental love song, but there is nothing traditional about The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye.

The first glimpse of the documentary’s titular couple finds them dressed in matching white casual clothes, like just another bunch of tourists wandering through the museum before an afternoon picnic in Central Park. But all is not as it seems.

For one thing, Genesis, a.k.a. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, does housework in five-inch heels. “I imagine I have an audience of fetishists in the house,” he explains. For another, both live their lives as art installations in progress. And there’s the fact that filmmaker Marie Losier borrows from the cut-up method in the film, as much a cut-and-paste collage. (There’s the choppy feeling of home videos, shot in 16mm film, that pan over the mismatched patio furniture at a backyard birthday party, which can suddenly cut to Genesis miming a swimming breast stroke in a vintage bathing cap.) It’s the same technique that experimental music pioneer Genesis famously used in his soundscapes with bands such as Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle in his early days, latterly with the likes of Skinny Puppy.

Genesis, born Neil Megson, is an avant-garde artist and one of the last holdouts of British hippie counterculture. He’s essentially the spiritual godfather of hard-to-categorize present-day acts like Peaches; beat novelist and friend William S. Burroughs once helped him get grants from the local arts council for his work.

Genesis met Burroughs in 1971 and the former admits he dropped Burroughs a bit after the Beat novelist enabled a meeting with artist Brion Gysin, who Genesis idolized. The cut-up method pioneer and the musician became close friends for the rest of Gysin’s life, with the latter acting as mentor. Genesis remembers small but personally meaningful details, such as the fact that because they were his favourite, Gysin always kept a packet of Cadbury’s chocolate fingers on hand in case he dropped by.

“This house is full of useless information,” Genesis declares in a sing-song voice at one point, prancing around catalogued aisles of ephemera such as his first record (1967’s Early Worm, made when he was 17), Psychic TV’s Live in Toronto and Prague albums and folders of old Burroughs footage and interviews stored in discarded Cuisinart appliance boxes.

Losier’s full and unprecedented access to Genesis’s and Lady Jaye’s East Village home — cluttered vermillion rooms littered with books on Jack Kerouac, Eames chairs and keyboards — include glimpses into the artists’ decade-spanning personal trove. The photo and film archive yields gems and rarities that range from vintage black-and-white film of Gysin smoking his hash pipe and then painting a room to footage of Genesis, circa mid-1970s, peeing into a milk bottle.

“Well you know how it is — you fall madly in love with somebody, hopefully once in your life and you just want to consume each other,” Genesis explains of his ardour for Lady Jaye, who he met in the 1990s.

Through systematic body modification they extended the Burroughs and Gysin ideas of the cutter to physical transformation through cosmetic surgeries to resemble one another. By cutting up their bodies, Genesis explains, they’re creating a third entity, a communal being they call “pandrogyne.” They got the same nose and matching breast implants; he got tattoo replicas of her beauty marks (on him, the overall effect of taught cheekbones and sculpted lips is something like AbFab’s Patsy meets Sally Struthers).

Instead of creating a child together through reproduction (when Lady Jaye was half of Genesis’s now-62 age), they decided to try and become as much like each other as they could, philosophically and physically, to transcend gender binarism — or what Lady Jaye called, “the ‘flesh suitcase’ of the human body.”

If that sentence sounded clunky, it’s that although Losier spent nearly a decade documenting the couple, Lady Jaye herself seldom comments on camera. Yet from what we do learn about her — that as a 14-year-old runaway she put herself through nursing college by working as a dominatrix and performing in cabarets — only make us want to learn more. She was at least as interesting as her soulmate.

But the documentary footage’s fragmented voice-over monologues are all Genesis, his own words and recollections and, sadly, because Lady Jaye died of natural causes in 2007, that voice in this ballad will remain silent.

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye opens March 16 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto.